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I was lurking in the Why are you not playing AoS? thread, and came across this discussion. We all play wargames for a variety of reasons, but there's usually one that outweighs the others. I'm a hobbiest first an foremost, so the quality of the miniatures is my top priority. What about you? I'm only polling the most important choice, but feel free to rank the options if you'd like. I'd rank them:

1) Quality miniatures
2) Size of the community
3) Good lore
4) Price of entry
5) Rules/game balance
6) Complexity

Multiple things, but I'd rank:

1) Size of Community (a game can be the best game written if nobody plays it it doesn't matter, sad as this is)
2) Rules
3) Lore
4) Cost (really tied with quality)
5) Quality (really tied with cost)
6) Complexity

I'm a hobbyist first, and have a great group of narrative players (who also have their competitive side). So getting a game never came into the equation.
Probably, after the hobby side of things (which I interpreted as quantity/quality of minis), I'd go with Rules, complexity.

Other: Overall aesthetic is the most important.

Could you elaborate on the aesthetic? Are you referring to just the minis, or are you also talking about the terrain, board layout, etc? What's a good example?

It's everything. Mini's, lore, terrain, how the game actually looks on the table. The gameplay has to be good of course but an awful lot of games have good rules but are let down by poor mini's, no real solid lore or just a general visual aesthetic I don't dig.

Okay. I get what you're saying now. I would agree with that being important. I can't remember the name of the wargame FFG tried to launch a couple years ago, but I remember that I wasn't interested at all because it looked very underwhelming. The whole thing looked like something Mattel would put out.

It doesn't matter how nice minis/rules are if I can't play a game of it. I move around a lot. So my option is 40k/AOS or own enough models to just loan it to another player and teach them the game.

Hopefully, I will get to settle down in my career soon and be able to form a strong group that can just pick up new games and try them out and not rely on the pick up game community at local stores.

I think that my answer would be a mix of good background and "other".

what i value most is the ability to use the game as a storytelling tool. I can put up with a lot in the terms of quality of miniatures and rules, since I run mainly cooperative games with my family these days. That means i tend to tweak rules to fit the situation anyhow, and competitiveness isn't too important to me.

But if i don't like the story or find the setting off putting or not appropriate for me group, I'm not going to want to get involved. I think my tastes are pretty niche, though and this is just what is most important to me.

For the list of options as given, I rank:

1. Tight, well-written rules/game balance
2. Quality/variety of miniatures
3. Good lore/background
4. Complexity
5. Price of entry/average army cost
6. Size of the community/easy to find a match

But my emphasis on rules isn't really quite defined as "tight" necessarily. I do want rules written as clearly as possible, because I hate gray and trying to interpret what the intended mechanics are. Really, though, I guess it's more of a combination of "tight" and "complexity" from your list with a big dose of "interesting." A rule set that has some interesting, different ways of doing things is much more intriguing to me than a system that, even if very clearly written and balanced, just does the same thing as other games I already have.

If the line has its own models (which, for me, is not a requirement and in fact I can get excited about games without bespoke models if they have good mechanics; e.g. Gaslands), then lore/background/setting is pretty important to me. Of course I like great models, and that is one of the biggest reasons I play games of this type, but a game line with great models but uninteresting rules or setting (to me) is not something I'm likely to do much with.

I know it seems like I should have ranked "Complexity" higher, but I don't necessarily think "complex" equates to "interesting." In fact, I can think of some games off hand that are overly complex that require a lot of bookkeeping and so on that don't really add anything to the gameplay or setting. I do not mind complex games themselves (one of my all time favorites is Star Fleet Battles, after all), but the complexity has to add something other than bean-counting to the game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 EnTyme wrote:
Okay. I get what you're saying now. I would agree with that being important. I can't remember the name of the wargame FFG tried to launch a couple years ago, but I remember that I wasn't interested at all because it looked very underwhelming. The whole thing looked like something Mattel would put out.

Was that Rune Wars by chance?
That one just felt too much like "X-Wing in Fantasy!" That is, it didn't have any particularly great grab as far as setting/lore, didn't do anything with really new mechanics (and, IMO, picked a mechanic that was totally unsuitable for the type of game they were aiming for; maneuver templates for foot battles just doesn't make sense), and tokens and clutter that really just added to the clunkiness of the system.

Eh I can't vote for one because they are all interdependent. Fantastic models are great but boring if you can never play with them; similarly a huge local community is great, but not as much fun if you don't enjoy the models or the game etc...

In the end even ranking them is hard because its very reliant on what you're doing at the moment. You might be really ito building or painting so rules and social might not be as important that month; however next month you might have built it all and now the social and gaming side is far more important. So the rankings are always going to be dynamic.

For me, voted "Other", what matters most is my opponent

a dire set of rules that attracts people who are fun to play that game against is way more important, for whatever reason it attracts them, than the tightest set of rules in the world that are played by people who are a struggle to play against

helps when rules discourage "TFG" type play and also rules lawyering

find smaller more oddball games more interesting for this reason, those who are a struggle to play against tend to avoid them

40k can be fun with the right opponent for example, but we all know it can be tiresome against the wrong one

edit - darn it why is posting not auto-opening pages for me toady! Doublepost

 Overread wrote:
Eh I can't vote for one because they are all interdependent. Fantastic models are great but boring if you can never play with them; similarly a huge local community is great, but not as much fun if you don't enjoy the models or the game etc...

In the end even ranking them is hard because its very reliant on what you're doing at the moment. You might be really ito building or painting so rules and social might not be as important that month; however next month you might have built it all and now the social and gaming side is far more important. So the rankings are always going to be dynamic.

That's actually a great point. I definitely swing between the "build and paint all the things" and "dammit I want to play something" phases.

I do find, though, that my model buying now often will include the "well, what game would I use this in?" qualifier. Thankfully, since I have a pretty wide collection of rule sets (and continually seem to pick up more), there's usually something that I can use to justify buying whatever neat model I fancy at the moment. Of course, finding the time to play (and, to a degree, someone to play with; though I'm a bit lucky in that a couple of my buddies are pretty open to trying most any random system, especially if they have models that could fit in with it or can just pull out of my collection for test games) is the biggest challenge for me these days.

 Valander wrote:
Was that Rune Wars by chance?
That one just felt too much like "X-Wing in Fantasy!" That is, it didn't have any particularly great grab as far as setting/lore, didn't do anything with really new mechanics (and, IMO, picked a mechanic that was totally unsuitable for the type of game they were aiming for; maneuver templates for foot battles just doesn't make sense), and tokens and clutter that really just added to the clunkiness of the system.

That's the one. I knew it was Rune (something).

I voted miniatures. Setting is a close second, but if that's poor or boring I can ignore it. Same with rules; if the published rules are no good they can be replaced. The miniatures are the things that get seen and used all the time, while everything else can change. I've played 40k using ten official sets rules as well as one or two unofficial, so clearly they're not important.

Every game I've picked up has been because of the miniatures. In at least two cases, that's all that was available; the official rules came along later.

Miniatures.
Setting.

If the first doesn't grab me, then no matter how good the rules, community or anything else is, I'm not going to play it.

This is the main reason I don't play AoS. I find the aesthetic stylings of the models to be less than stellar.

 amazingturtles wrote:
I think that my answer would be a mix of good background and "other".

what i value most is the ability to use the game as a storytelling tool. I can put up with a lot in the terms of quality of miniatures and rules, since I run mainly cooperative games with my family these days. That means i tend to tweak rules to fit the situation anyhow, and competitiveness isn't too important to me.

But if i don't like the story or find the setting off putting or not appropriate for me group, I'm not going to want to get involved. I think my tastes are pretty niche, though and this is just what is most important to me.

I put other for this same reason. Well put.

 EnTyme wrote:

1) Quality miniatures
2) Size of the community
3) Good lore
4) Price of entry
5) Rules/game balance
6) Complexity

For me,
The Quality of Miniatures gets a game noticed.
The Price of the Miniatures risks scaring me away or throwing me into wild abandon.
The Lore is the backbone of a long term relationship.
The Rules won’t be an issue. If they’re terrible, I’ll use some generic rules as a game aid, and if they are great, it’ll make it easier to play with friends.
The size of the community is irrelevant. I only play with people I’m already comfortable gaming with who are game.
The Complexity... how is that a separate point from the rules?

Tl/dr: the lore is the most important aspect for me, but poor minis or poor prices are a nonstarter.

Pretty much all the above but at the end of the day it comes down to tight, well written and balanced rules as the most important.

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question - ask not what is most important, but what is best!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiKPCLVQ6n4

Fun, period. Am I having fun. If not, then why am I playing it? Fun can come from a variety of places, even bad rules can be FUN.

Price of entry/average army cost
Tight, well-written rules/game balance
Good lore/background
Quality/variety of miniatures

All 4 of these are just as important these days for me.
It's where GW consistently fails.

For me, it is the quality of the community that is probably most important. If the gaming group is huge but is full a players that want something radically different (in my case competitive, tournament style play) than what I want out of a game that is no good. I am looking for a group that is rather like mined in what they want of the game more than anything else.

For me it comes down to a few things, a lot of which have been mentioned above

-Background and models- if the models look bad and the background is garbage/shallow I won't be as interested.
-Size of games/cost- the main reason I play skirmish games more than anything. Low cost means not only is it cheap to start, it's cheap to buy multiple factions to mix up playstyles
-Community- this one is more abstract, but if I have issues with the community for a game I won't stick around or I'll detach myself. This was a major reason I dropped Warmachine, and I'm feeling very burnt out with Malifaux at the moment because that same mindset from Warmachine is seeping in there (because it's the same people in a lot of cases)

 meatybtz wrote:
Fun, period. Am I having fun. If not, then why am I playing it? Fun can come from a variety of places, even bad rules can be FUN.

This 110%. Due to a variety of factors (age, work responsibilities, lack of a player base), I really only play with my 10-year old son. If the game isn't fun, it's a waste of time for both of us.

I can’t rank those or pick one out, although I did vote for community in the end.

For me there are multiple combinations of the first 5 options listed that I would value equally depending on how any given game’s combo of those washed out in an overall assessment.

The 3 games I play at the moment are LotR, KoW and WH Underworlds, 3 very different games, 3 very different combinations of the listed factors, but whilst I would rank them in the order I wrote them, for me there isn’t much to choose between them.

There's really three main factors. One, and maybe the most important: is there an army that I like the look AND lore of?

Two: is the lore any good?This can be anything from ultra-detailed to barely there, but not getting in the way (for example- Firestorm Armada had lore that was paper-thin, but it didn't make me groan and want to never read it again)

Three: Do I like the rules? Again, it doesn't mean "are the rules complex and deep", more like do they flow better, and can I remember them without referring to the book ten times. Tomorrow's War was a great set of rules, but nigh unplayable due to layout and editing. AoS is simplistic as it gets, but has easy and quick rules that work as intended.

if those three are met, there is a good chance I will give the game a shot, and will be able to talk someone in my small circle into trying it out.

I voted 'Other' as, for me, the most important thing is an equal three-way split between miniatures, setting, and whether or not the game is fun to play, which isn't a listed option.

These are the most important -

1. Tight, well-written rules/game balance

2. Good lore/background - but if the rules are flexible I can use someone else's setting. (I have used the KoW rules with the Warhammer setting with no problems.)

These are secondary -

3. Quality/variety of miniatures - if the rules and background are good - I can use anybody's miniatures.

4. Price of entry/average army cost - see above - I can use someone else's miniatures if they gouge.

Complexity does not factor in, except in how they pertain to the rules quality and balance.

And I have no problem creating a community, so that is not a factor either. (Most game groups for any system have one or a more people at the core that create that community.)

The Auld Grump